Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features.
Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who
absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the
language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something,
as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the
latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single
program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at
endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to
international freedom."

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the
text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on
Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other
programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though
only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations,
and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved
by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me
more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and
Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta
snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once
every few hours."

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near
future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far
too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is
now using it, so it must be growing!"

funny right down to the subtle replacement of the letter O with a zero .
Did you make this up yourself? It's pretty damn good what about the same for users of other distributions, we all like to laugh at ourselves but we need to laugh at others from time to time too .

"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something,
as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the
latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

That's hilarious. And it's even more funny the fact that GentooManiac has only one post...this one. I wonder if someone is jealous?

Jealous? Heh. I've been using Linux and other UNIX systems for about 6 years now; equally, I credited Gentoo for its innovation in my original post.

But the fact is, some of us just want to get work done, and need a solid, tested and patched set of packages with very good QA -- only Debian and Red Hat really offer that at the moment. If Gentoo becomes more organised and more work put into proper errata which don't affect the rest of the system, I'll be more inclined to deploy it. But as it stands, it's not a viable option for businesses at the moment, or home users who want maximum stability and easy security updates.

But the fact is, some of us just want to get work done, and need a solid, tested and patched set of packages with very good QA -- only Debian and Red Hat really offer that at the moment. If Gentoo becomes more organised and more work put into proper errata which don't affect the rest of the system, I'll be more inclined to deploy it. But as it stands, it's not a viable option for businesses at the moment, or home users who want maximum stability and easy security updates.

Flame on

Flame off, please.

BTW. Gentoo stable is quite reliable, also you should consider the fact that it is much younger and up-to-date. _________________I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

First of all, let me say that I had a good laugh through this post. It really does put things in perspective. There, now that that's out of the way, let's continue.

GentooManiac wrote:

Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something,
as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the
latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."

I frequently do other things while compiling. Surf the net, write papers in LaTeX, play games, etc.

Quote:

"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single
program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at
endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to
international freedom."

I say that any time you select OSS over proprietary, that is a victory (however small). It's possible that someone may ask you if you use program X, and you'll respond that you use program Y - an open source alternative. Not everyone can code, but would like to contribute in any way possbile.

Quote:

"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the
text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on
Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."

Maybe things have changed greatly since 1.4rc3, but if a text based installer like the one in FreeBSD scared you off, then you probably wouldn't be using Gentoo right now.

Quote:

"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other
programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though
only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations,
and RPMs and .debs can be rebuilt with a handful of commands (AND Red Hat
supplies i686 kernel and glibc packages), my box MUST be faster. It's nothing
to do with the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."

This one I agree with. On the other hand, I spend far more time not compiling than compiling, so in the end that time spent building packages isn't really significant. Also, I do a lot more computational stuff, so I like being able to optimise. I do agree, though, that it's also fairly trivial to recompile debian and rpm packages.

This one I laughed at. It doesn't take much these days to call your PC a workstation. My computer, however, is pretty cool. It's on of those shuttle mini pc's.

Quote:

"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved
by specifying BOTH .rpms together on the command line, and that problems
hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages instead of mixing
SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together (which the system wasn't
designed for)."

Now, there's no reason to be calling people stupid. Also, perhaps I'm just too smart and understand that a properly designed packaging system and well-tested packages wouldn't suffer from circular dependencies in the first place.

Quote:

"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me
more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and
Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta
snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once
every few hours."

This just comes down to personal preference. How up-to-date do you want to be versus how well tested do you want your packages to be. Personally, I'm willing to trade some testing for newer packages. I haven't really been disappointed so far. The only times I run into crashes or instability is when I install cvs stuff, which is pretty rare.

Quote:

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near
future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far
too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is
now using it, so it must be growing!"

How do you know that no serious business will consider it? I'm not saying Gentoo is definitely the future, but that no one can predict it. There are ways to minimize the deployment time. Keep in mind that if your environment is fairly homogonized, it wouldn't be so hard or time consuming to generate binary packages and send them to the different computers. I do believe that without proper support set up, it will be very difficult to get businesses to use Gentoo.

Quote:

But as it stands, it's not a viable option for businesses at the moment, or home users who want maximum stability and easy security updates.

all that complicated? It's not a whole lot more difficult than installing a new deb or rpm. As for stability, I very rarely have programs, let alone the system, crash with Gentoo. Really only when I'm running something marked as unstable (the development kernel, cvs versions of packages, etc) - which is why those versions are usually masked.

Despite this fairly long response, I don't think that Gentoo is for everyone. It's not a one distribution fits all and it doesn't need to be. I guess I'm still upset at it being implied that I'm stupid because I don't like the way rpm handles dependencies

That's hilarious. And it's even more funny the fact that GentooManiac has only one post...this one. I wonder if someone is jealous?

Jealous? Heh. I've been using Linux and other UNIX systems for about 6 years now; equally, I credited Gentoo for its innovation in my original post.

But the fact is, some of us just want to get work done, and need a solid, tested and patched set of packages with very good QA -- only Debian and Red Hat really offer that at the moment. If Gentoo becomes more organised and more work put into proper errata which don't affect the rest of the system, I'll be more inclined to deploy it. But as it stands, it's not a viable option for businesses at the moment, or home users who want maximum stability and easy security updates.

Flame on

Maybe because Gentoo is aimed at the power user? I'd personaly never install Gentoo on anything other than my desktop. If i wanted something stable and security critical I wouldnt install any Linux, Free or OpenBSD own that market in my eyes.

Think before you flame.
Gentoo isnt intended for many of the things you critisiced it for._________________a.k.a port001
Found a bug? Please report it: Gentoo Bugzilla

I say that any time you select OSS over proprietary, that is a victory (however small). It's possible that someone may ask you if you use program X, and you'll respond that you use program Y - an open source alternative. Not everyone can code, but would like to contribute in any way possbile.

Yep, you're right, but that wasn't the point of the "joke". It's because, as a long time Linux user, advocate and developer, I STILL get jibes from fans of source-based distros; things like "you obviously don't value open source if you use binary packages". It's insulting and patronising, and sadly I've seen a lot of this from Gentoo advocates.

Quote:

This one I laughed at. It doesn't take much these days to call your PC a workstation. My computer, however, is pretty cool. It's on of those shuttle mini pc's.

Depends... compared to Sun, IBM and HP boxes, most PC boxes aren't remotely "workstations". Dell do some nice systems, though

Quote:

Now, there's no reason to be calling people stupid. Also, perhaps I'm just too smart and understand that a properly designed packaging system and well-tested packages wouldn't suffer from circular dependencies in the first place.

But that's the whole point -- the "circular dependencies" problem is a myth. Once you understand RPM, it's not an issue. And again, unfortunately I've seen Gentoo advocates TELL me about problems with RPM which don't exist.

Quote:

How do you know that no serious business will consider it?

Because the positive aspects of Gentoo to us geeks, like the control, optimisations and ease of upgrading are NOT attractive to businesses. They want boring, stable, EOL dates five years from now etc. Red Hat don't make money selling 5,000 shrinkwrapped copies of RHL to huge companies like Shell. They sell support, consistency and most importantly the fact that they'll still be around 5 or 10 years down the line.

As stated, Gentoo's features are cool for people who like to get all the latest free software and tune their systems, but that doesn't appeal to big business.

Quote:

Despite this fairly long response, I don't think that Gentoo is for everyone. It's not a one distribution fits all and it doesn't need to be. I guess I'm still upset at it being implied that I'm stupid because I don't like the way rpm handles dependencies

The original post was just some humour, and I was knocking the zealots. Your post was informed and made good points, and most on these forums appear to be the same. Red Hat isn't for everyone, Debian isn't for everyone, and Gentoo isn't for everyone. It's great that most people understand that.

Unfortunately, it's the zealots who think their distro makes others worthless, and then make condescending remarks to very experienced Linuxers, that are the problem. They're the people I was knocking in my post. Just an overly-vocal few!

The original post was just some humour, and I was knocking the zealots. Your post was informed and made good points, and most on these forums appear to be the same. Red Hat isn't for everyone, Debian isn't for everyone, and Gentoo isn't for everyone. It's great that most people understand that.

Sorry, sometimes my humor detector fails. And by sometimes, I mean most of the time. Like I said, I did have a good laugh, especially at the workstation one

But that's the whole point -- the "circular dependencies" problem is a myth. Once you understand RPM, it's not an issue. And again, unfortunately I've seen Gentoo advocates TELL me about problems with RPM which don't exist.

While I'm not an expert on RPM, I did use it for a while, and didn't particularly care for it; it(like all package managers) has its advantages and disadvantages. RPM's big drawback(as far as I understand) is the dependencies(not circular ones, I know that's a myth), just the fact that you have to manually install dependencies, or use a script or something external to RPM. It has some nice utilities, like the ability to verify installed package, upgrade, and remove packages. Plus, your distribution will have a standardized set which *should* be stable and work well together(I emphasize should, because I'm not sure it's always true, based on my experience with Mandrake).

Compare to Portage, the downside is of course compile time, also, its not very practical with a slow internet connection(although it can be done). On the upside, compiling once the system is up(after initial install) doesn't mean the system is *down*. You can still use the system, you can also run updates while you sleep, and so on. It's not so onerous, even in a corporate environment. BIG advantage(well, depending on what you want and need in a system) to Portage, is the automatic handling of dependencies. Optimizations are just a nice supported feature, to be exploited by mainly power users, generally, in a corporate environment, more conservative optimizations can be used if stability is your main goal. In cases where there are multiple similar workstations, only one needs to compile packages, and the binaries can be distributed to the others.

Regarding Redhat selling things like an assurance that they will still be here 5-10 years from now, I can understand that people wanting to deploy an OS in a business would like to know that the distro they choose will still be around, and that they might be leery of new distros like Gentoo. I have no doubts about Gentoo being around for the long haul, but to someone who doesn't understand it making business decisions, if they even look a Gentoo, they'll see that 'oh, its only version 1.4rc4, better stay away from that'. I can see it being adopted in places where a sysadmin who happens to be a Gentoo enthusiast has some degree of autonomy(or at least ability to convince superiors) in setting up a system, which probably is a fairly small niche, but that's ok, Gentoo does not use the same kind of business model as a distro like Redhat.

I really enjoyed the post . But I have seen quite a few posts from people that DO use gentoo in business. There are gentoo clusters, workstations, servers out there doing business every day. I am not one of them (homeuser), but someday I may very well be operating my own small business and would not use much else for my OS.

Maybe it's time to setup a new forum topic... like Mandrake's Mandrake in Business and keep it as a read only forum to prevent flame wars & run on threads, (that's what chat is for)

This does just seem like a gas stove waiting for a spark. Although I don't necissarily disagree with the poster, I do think that Gentoo is mature enough to do what you want. I moved from Debian to Gentoo, not because I heard things about gentoo, but because I stumbled over it and decided to give it a try. I hadn't had the gentoo preachers give me the gospel before jumping head first in.
IMHO: Gentoo is easier to maintain than any distro I've used. I enjoy having a hand-config approach to my system, so that I don't have to go undo what someone else thought was good for me. The only other distro i'd even think of using other than Gentoo is Debian-Secure (now at v1.0).
I don't see how Gentoo's out-spoken users is a bad thing. We may have people who pretend to be 133t because they can get an install finished by reading the Install guide, but at least these newb don't stay newbs. I see people all the time pretending that they are 133t just because they use RH or MDK or SuSE...it's the fact that they can somehow manage to install "Linux" by clicking on dialog boxes and follow wizards that makes them so 133t, I guess. That's far different than an excited Gentoonewb who makes his first successful install and in the proccess knows more about his/her box and *nix in an hour's worth of work than an RPM-newb ever does. People are outspoken because they love a distro that can keep them up-to-date, teach them how to use *nix while not pretending to be windows, and take them away from hand-holding.
Gentoo is a community effort, more so than any other distro out there. People talk because that's the way that Gentoo works. We don't need to be developers/core team just to make a difference in Gentoo.
btw...
The post is hilarious.

19:04 <+bahadunn> https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=294221
19:04 -!- Mode change +o Tekmanx on #bahamians by dreadman
19:04 -!- Mode change +m on #bahamians by Tekmanx
19:05 <@Tekmanx> Like I was saying...if it get's sooo much attention that should say alot
19:06 <+bahadunn> that sounds about right from what I have read
19:06 <+bahadunn> im going to add what you just said to this forum
19:06 -!- Mode change -v bahadunn on #bahamians by Tekmanx

Reimplementing what I designed in 1979
is not interesting to me personally
For kids who are 20 years younger
than me, Linux is a great way to
cut your teeth. It's a cultural
phenomenon and a business phenomenon
Mac OS X is a rock-solid system
that's beautifully designed. I much
prefer it to Linux.
Open source is fine but it doesn't take
a worldwide community to create a
great operating system. Look at
Ken Thompson creating Unix, Stephen
Wolfram writing Mathematica in a summer, James Gosling in his office making Java. Now there's nothing wrong with letting other people help, but open source doesn't assist the initial creative act. What we need now are great things. I don't need to see the source code. I just want a system that works.

But the fact is, some of us just want to get work done, and need a solid, tested and patched set of packages with very good QA -- only Debian and Red Hat really offer that at the moment. If Gentoo becomes more organised and more work put into proper errata which don't affect the rest of the system, I'll be more inclined to deploy it. But as it stands, it's not a viable option for businesses at the moment, or home users who want maximum stability and easy security updates.

Flame on

Okay, that's great. Who's determined to deploy Gentoo in a production environment, and why did this cause you to post a tired old cut-and-paste? I don't understand why people think that posting lame, insulting humor will cause project leaders to stroke their chins and say, "Gee, yeah, I guess we ought to concentrate on enterprise-level computing!"

And Debian? Please... I suppose Debian Stable for production servers, but I wouldn't. I already have people saying "job security" and "clusterfuck" when I install Perl modules on OS X machines.

"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near
future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far
too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is
now using it, so it must be growing!"

I just thot I'd quote on this. I know it may be kinda late from the original post, but I think it's good to hear.

I work offshore. Seismic industry (it sux, don't do it you'll never escape it!) and for the longest time, everything was run on either UNIX or NT...

Well, just this past year, the navigation is being migrated from NT to Linux and the gun controllers from UNIX to Linux as well.
And at first they were using DeadHat... to which they finally realized that Gentoo was much better for configuring machines for specifics, rather than bulky installs that are forced upon you.

Anyway, long story short, the oil industy has indeed adopted Gentoo linux.
Matter of fact, this past 5 weeks that I've been on the ship, I've used my spare time configuring, and teaching Gentoo fromt he ground up to the Chief Observer. He's totally hooked.